I noticed the other night that Lawrence O'Donnell on MSNBC has jumped with both feet aboard the story of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the Florida teenager who was shot by a "neighborhood watch" officer, apparently for the crime of being in the wrong place with Skittles and an iced tea. This does not surprise me in the least, because I was a small part of a similar story back in the late 1970's in Boston.

When I worked for the Boston Phoenix, my colleague, the late Dave O'Brian, was entangled in a case involving the events that occurred when he'd gone on a "ridearound" with some Boston cops one night in 1975. At one point, the cops blew away a black hospital worker named James Bowden for the crime of driving a car with a license plate "similar" to one that had been seen on a car fleeing a grocery store robbery. Covering their asses, the cops tried to frame the dead guy for the grocery-store robbery. Bowden's family had the great good fortune of hiring as its lawyer Lawrence O'Donnell, Sr. The senior O'Donnell started out as a Boston cop. He also was counsel for the defense in the legendary Brinks Job robbery trial. And, you can believe me when I say this, O'Donnell was exactly the kind of lawyer that you do not want to see at the other table if you're a cop trying to bullshit your way out of a bad shoot that stunk to high heaven. As I recall, all of the O'Donnell sons were involved in the investigation of the case, too, and Lawrence, Jr. eventually wrote a book about it.

Dave O'Brian, naturally, was a star witness for the Bowden family in their suit against the Boston P.D. So, on the days he had to testify, I'd have to cover the trial in his place, which meant I got to watch O'Donnell Sr. at work a couple of times. Eventually, after endless delays and a near-police strike, the Bowdens won a settlement of $843,498 and an acknowledgement that James Bowden had died an innocent man. All of which is to say that, if Lawrence O'Donnell, Jr. is on this case, then it's because he's lived it once before, even though this one is immeasurably worse.

The details in the new case are piling up, and they're getting more grotesque by the day. If the accounts of the cellphone calls are to be believed, Martin thought that George Zimmerman was stalking him. There's some rattling of the cage regarding Florida's idiotic "stand your ground" law, which some prosectors predicted at the time of its passage would inevitably produce something like this. The local police, who've botched this thing from minute one, are now going to have the Department Of Justice and the FBI gnawing on their ankles, to say nothing of the fact that the local cops seem to have bungled their way into the Emmett Till case of the new millennium. There will be marches and protests, and a lot of pissed off local cops doing crowd control. (Let us be clear. Some of the cops may be on Zimmerman's side but, I suspect, most of them are going to be pissed because they don't like to be in the middle of a circus caused by the deadly stupidity of a Dirty Harry wannabe.) And all because some triggerhappy local crank apparently decided that he was so threatened by Skittles and iced tea that he had no choice but to turn a public street into the OK Corral.

And, as much as it pains me to say it, the American right already has determined that the whole controversy is a subtle plot by the Kenyan Muslim black liberationist Derrick Bell-hugger to gin up racial distrust so as to guarantee his re-election as Chief Executive Shaka Zulu. And, also, to steal all the guns from white people. This story is nowhere near as sad as it's going to get. Kudos to O'Donnell for jumping on it so hard.